What is the difference between “organic” plant-based minerals and “non-organic” minerals?
Organic minerals are those derived from plant-based foods such as vegetables and botanicals. Organic minerals are received by consuming plant food. Their root systems convert rock-solid non-organic minerals into useable organic ones. The word organic is often misused by referring to a mineral or a specific chemical compound rather than a “living” entity, and that creates a lot of confusion.
“Organic” chemistry defines many toxic and poisonous compounds as organic, so the use of the word itself is problematic. It is clearer to refer to minerals as either naturally occurring in foods or not naturally occurring. Using the term naturally occurring is how we distinguish between natural and unnatural vitamins, so the same standard applies to minerals. These recommended standards eliminate any confusion concerning the issue of organic and non-organic minerals.
Minerals from food sources contain many cofactors such as enzymes, vitamins, hormones, oxygen, phytonutrients, enzymes, and other yet unknown elements.
As with vitamins, nature does not make isolated, individual minerals in foods without cofactors. All the naturally occurring minerals in food sources are naturally chelated (broken down to a digestible form) compounds that are bound to other nutrient factors such as other minerals, vitamins, hormones, enzymes, oxygen, and phytonutrient compounds that are in the food source itself. For example, when an alfalfa plant absorbs calcium carbonate from the soil, that calcium is metabolized and transformed through the plant’s complex chemical “factory” into calcium phytate or other organic calcium compounds. In addition, other vitamins, minerals, and nutritional factors may have been united with the calcium phytate to form a unique source of naturally occurring calcium complex.
Botanicals have the ability to transmute compounds and nutritional factors into a useful, complex nutrient matrix such as a vitamin or a specialized protein. The naturally occurring minerals found in foods are “complexed” and pre-metabolized, making them more nutritionally useful and bioavailable than non-organic, non-food forms of mineals, which often accumulate in the body and cause calcium and mineral deposits as well as hardening of the arteries.
Calcium from food sources is more assimilable and bioavailable than calcium from rocks, sediments, and other non-organic mineral sources. Non-organic minerals are not formed by fresh, living matter and contain no vital carbon compounds. As do all organic minerals, organic calcium materials contain carbon that was once a part of, or produced or metabolized by, living plants or animals.
